NIC-10's black coaches talk race and sports

Matt Trowbridge Staff writer @matttrowbridge

Tuesday

Apr 3, 2018 at 6:41 PMApr 3, 2018 at 11:14 PM

East football coach Gary Griffin, the son of a biracial mother and black father, started school in the midst of Rockford’s first desegregation lawsuit. Rockford’s response to the Quality Education for All Children case was to offer school choice and to redraw a couple of school zones.

The choice didn’t work — fewer than 150 of the district’s 40,000 students chose to switch schools, and 94 of them switched because the district closed Muldoon School, a predominantly black elementary school in southwest Rockford.

Griffin was part of the other response. The Concord Commons projects were divided in 1974 between Welsh and Walker Elementary schools, which before the change combined for 33 black kids out of 1,195 students.

“I was on that first bus going to Welsh,” Griffin said. “I remember getting off that bus and people standing outside, not happy that we were coming to their neighborhood school."

One person was happy to see them, though. And, to this day, Griffin tears up when he talks about his first-grade teacher.

“Having a teacher like Mrs. Amdal waiting for us there, grabbing us right away and taking us off the bus and treating us like we were her kids, that made everything OK. She is the reason I went into education. She was there for the little kids,” Griffin said, tears trickling out of both eyes.

“She was a great lady. A great, great lady.”

Anthony Dedmond, newly hired as Freeport’s football coach, is the only other black head coach in NIC-10 football or boys basketball.

The number of black coaches in the two most prominent NIC-10 sports is under scrutiny at the moment. There are four vacancies among the conference's boys basketball teams. Just last year, Ken DuBose, who is black, was forced out as Jefferson's head football coach, a move that sparked a brief player boycott.

Dedmond, the only black wrestling coach in the NIC-10 for the past 13 years, is accustomed to standing out. But he has also felt welcomed.

“Our entire NIC-10 wrestling family has been amazing to me and my wrestlers,” Dedmond said, singling out East’s Gene Lee and former coaches Dan McNames of Belvidere and Tom Draheim of Harlem, as well as Pete Alber of NUIC school Dakota. “They always helped us out in any way possible. Even the newer guys coming in always show us love and respect.

“We are wrestling those teams, but they don’t make it about the teams, they make it about the kids. When you have people on your side and taking you in with open arms, that makes you feel comfortable.”

Comfortable. That’s not a word that comes up often in discussions about race.

Griffin and Dedmond say it doesn’t have to be that way.

“You treat people right and you do right, people don’t see color,” Griffin said. “When you are kids, you don’t see color. We have to be taught that. When we were kids, we just played, we had fun, we hung out together. It’s the adults who create that divide, not the kids.

“Race has become so blurred now with all the social-economic issues. It’s really about money now. It’s not about Hispanic or African-American or white. It’s about rich and poor.”

Dedmond tries to unite, not divide.

“If we’re going to make changes to our community, we need some of everybody involved,” said Dedmond, who is the truancy officer for Freeport's middle schools. “I don’t want to make it about one side of town. I want us all to be one class and one community.”

That doesn’t sound easy in these contentious times. It’s even harder to see in a sports world that is more diverse than any other segment of American society. With the players, anyway. Not so often with the coaches.

“We have a lot of black assistant coaches, but very few head coaches, and it’s been that way for a while,” Dedmond said. “It is important to have black coaches, but we need to involve more black people in general in the total program. Black people should be involved everywhere.”

Griffin wants to help with that.

Only 2 percent of U.S. schoolteachers are black males. Griffin dreams of opening a high school for black males led by black teachers and black administrators in Milwaukee, which he calls “the most segregated place I’ve been in my entire life.”

Milwaukee is also where he got his start as a teacher. He left Concordia University in Wisconsin — where he is in the school hall of fame as a defensive back — to pursue a pro career, only to see both the World League of American Football and then the Professional Spring Football League fold while he was with teams in training camp. He moved to Milwaukee, where he did “a whole bunch of things,” including owning a nightclub and working for the power company, before going back to Concordia to earn his teaching degree.

He taught at a private school in Milwaukee for more than a decade before moving to Rockford Lutheran, his alma mater, for four years and then to East.

“One of our biggest problems is there are not enough teachers and administrators who look like the minority kids,” said Griffin, who is athletic director and dean at East. “The thing that bothers me the most is our kids see the people who look like them cleaning and serving food. They don’t see them teaching.

“My 10-year plan is to get back to Milwaukee and open a school for minority boys. I want to get 250 boys and populate the school with minority administrators and teachers and our kids come to school with a shirt and tie and jacket and teach them what life is about.

“Education is the only way to get a career. Without education, you get a job, and a job is that thing you come home and say once a week, ‘I hate this job.’ I want our kids to have a career.”